Introduction

Backstory

If You’re Reading This, It’s Not Too Late

Welcome to my storyboard that will discuss some interesting highlights regarding Drake’s albums and songs featured in them. Drake has reinvented himself many times. How has his style changed over time? I shall look at the audio features for each major album, and cluster them into distinct style periods. My chosen corpus consists of music by the Canadian rapper Drake. Drake has been one of my favourite artists for several years. He has has also consistently been my number one listened to artist, according to Spotify. The interesting thing about Drake is that he always bring out albums that are true to himself, but also releases music that is out of his comfort zone. Therefore, the comparison points in my corpus will be a select number of his albums and mixtapes. Drake is well-known for expressing his emotions in his music and I expect the results to project this as well. This means that some albums will concern the concept of love and heartbreak, while others would focus more on a bachelor lifestyle. In addition, I think that Drake makes bolder moves over the years regarding his rapping style and music genres he indulges himself in. I expect a lot of variance in the danceability, energy, speechiness and valence across the albums. Drake is also known for making a lot of hits. It will be interesting to find his most popular songs and see why they gained popularity and how they differ from one another. What are the requirements for Drake to make a hit?

Album names

Albums

Care Package

Certified Lover Boy

Dark Lane Demo Tapes

Her Loss

Honestly, Nevermind

If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late

More Life

Nothing Was The Same (Deluxe)

Scorpion

So Far Gone

Take Care (Deluxe)

Thank Me Later (Int’l Version)

Views

What A Time To Be Alive

Albums

Energy

The energy distribution over Drake’s albums is shown in this plot. It is visible that his albums do not have a set energy distribution, it is quite varied. The albums ‘Her Loss’ and ‘What A Time To Be Alive’ seem to follow a balanced distribution, whereas ‘Thank Me Later (Int’l Version)’ has more of a build up of energies.

More Dance or More Energy?

This plot shows the computed average danceability and the average energy. The general trend of this plot is that albums with a higher average energy tend to have a lower average danceability. The lower energy songs tend to have a higher daneceability. It is interesting to see that a single outlier for this would be the Take Care album. This album in particular contains the lowest average energy and the lowest average danceability. The album Thank Me Later has the highest average energy and has the lowest average danceability. More Life on the other hand has the lowest average energy and one of the highest average danceability. The majority of Drake’s albums seem to have an average danceability between 0.6 and 0.75, with their computed average energy ranging from 0.5 to 0.6.

More Life vs Thank Me Later

The dancergy plot showed us that Thank Me Later is the album with the highest energy and lowest danceability, whereas the album with the lowest energy and a high danceability is More Life. This plot shows the distribution of keys between these two extreme albums. It is visible that More Life makes use of all the keys found in a pitch class. Thank Me Later on the other hand mainly uses the keys in the range of 6 to 9. What is noticable is that most of the More Life songs are in keys 1, 7 and 11. Keys 1 and 11 specifically are not to me found in Take Me Later.

Diamonds Dancing

The album What A Time To Be Alive showed to have the highest danceability, therefore it would seem fit to see the danceability distribution over the songs found in the album. The all of the songs have a danceability over 0.7, with the exception of Diamonds Dancing. This song ranks the lowest on the danceability bar with a value of 0.5, which is ironic given the song title.

Songs

Rich Flex

A chromagram represents the time against the pitch classes. It shows the measurement of the energy per pitch class. This chromagram shows the analysis of Drake’s currently most popular song Rich Flex. The normalisation vector used here was chebyshev. The choice for this is simple: because Spotify also does so. In my opinion it is better to keep the method of analysis as close to Spotify’s handling as possible. What is clear from this visualisation is that the C#/Db note is found throughout the majority of the song. Notes G and F#/Gb show more presence after around 120s. The A#/Bb note is hardly detected, while the B note shows a little more presence, but not much. The rest of the notes are quite spread through the song.